According to the The National they’re going to turn Black Friday violet this year with a special edition release of this years critically loved release “High Violet” If you’re as big a fan of The National as we are, this reason to celebrate. You can watch the video above for all the details, but if you’re adverse to the you tubes i’ll give you the long short of it here.

2 New Songs: Wake up the Saints & You were a kindnesss

2 New Bsides: Walk Off & Sin Eaters

3 Live Recordings: Bloodbuzz Ohia, Anyone’s Ghost & England

Alternative Version of Terrible Love

all for a paltry 7.99

High Violet Expanded Edition will be available at Pure Pop exclusively in this area in limited numbers, if you’d like to reserve a copy, you can click here or on the link in the sidebar! For more information on the release go here.

Got a couple videos for ya’ll to check out. One from local indie darling (and all around nice person) Alexandra Hall AKA Tooth Ache. for her single “Skin”.

tooth ache. | “skin” from WEIRD CANDLES on Vimeo.

The other, created by local legend Joey Pizza Slice, AKA Chubby Wonder AKA the dude in the wheelchair at the Nosebleed Island shows… for the group BLANCHE BLANCHE BLACHE‘s new track “Talk Out Loud”. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0r2nNceFQM

Here it is folks, Kanye’s latest massive blast of Id – and maybe it’s just me and maybe i just haven’t had my coffee yet (yes i know it’s past noon…)and my critical faculties aren’t what they should be… but… damn this is good. Production values, the tunes, sexy bird girl, kind of corny, a bit self aware (but not as much as i think it’d like to be.) but over all fresh, fun, incredibly stylish, sexy, and the tracks are very interesting, incredibly catchy – and even heartfelt.

Warning, sort of NSFW…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7W0DMAx8FY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q77YBmtd2Rw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_62BBV0wJE

Or maybe it’s something else altogether. You decide. Their major label debut comes out soon. Oh yeah, Not Safe For Work.

Welcome to part deux of our Witch House 101 seminar! In the first part of this article, we looked at Witch House (aka “Drag”, aka “Ghost Drone”, aka “Whothehellcares”) from the 10,000ft level, discussing the general sonic philosophy and various influences behind the Witch House sound, as well as exploring the genre’s bipolar relationship with the internet that helped spawn its success.

In this second part of the series, we are going to look a bit more closely at the various labels and artists that actually make up the loosely-defined genre, list some of its “essential releases”, and discuss some of the highly anticipated new releases coming in 2010.

LABELS

1) Acephale Records

While I wouldn’t go so far as to call Acephale a “witch house” label, they did, in a way, help introduce the world to the genre. The label’s very first release in 2008 was the now-classic SALEM EP “Yes I Smoke Crack”. SALEM is often looked at as the “founders” of the Witch House sound (or at least one of the key influences for many of the newer artists entering the genre), and this was their first physical offering to the outside world. While the sounds on this EP are very far from the SALEM we know today, the key elements of chopped-and-screwed beats, highly effected vocals and creepy atmospheric synthesizers are all there. Also, it introduced the earliest version of the song that is pretty much a Witch House anthem, “Redlights”.

2) TRI ANGLE

Tri Angle was started in early 2010 by Robin Carolan, a writer for the 20 Jazz Funk Greats blog (which has recently gained a great deal of attention as a crucial partner in Pitchfork’s “Altered Zones” collective). While Tri Angle has released very few albums and has a pretty minimalist web presence (its website is about as barebones as it gets, with just links to artist MySpace pages and distributors), it has quickly become one of the hottest labels in Witch House and one of the most discussed labels in all of underground music in 2010. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that their releases are distributed by famous German minimalist techno label Kompakt.

Carolan is one of the more outspoken folks in the Witch House scene. Many have seemed desperate to avoid defining or promoting the music altogether, preferring to keep it as an anarchist, underground movement. This dream probably jumped the shark when Pitchfork profiled the genre in a recent article called “Ghosts In the Machine”.

Preferring the moniker “drag” over “witch house” to define the sound, Carolan describes it as “a witching-hour vision of Cocteau Twins dream pop, meshed with the soundtrack to a particularly angsty Gregg Araki film full of Gen X shoegazer atmospherics and industrial beats, brought bang up to the date by the influence of raw hip hop mutations like chopped and screwed and juke.” Pretty astute and accurate, if you ask me.

Tri Angle currently boasts the most impressive roster of up-and-coming witch house artists, including Balam Acab (aka Alec Koone) of Ithaca, NY and oOoOO (aka Dexter Greenspan) of San Francisco, each of whom are releasing two of the most widely anticipated albums this year.

3) DISARO

Another key witch house label is DISARO, started in 2007 by a Houston, TX based DJ named Robert Disaro. While the label has been around for a few years, it didn’t start releasing witch house artists until early 2010, with a string of key releases by key genre artists like Mater Suspiria Vision, GR†LLGR†LL, oOoOO, Modern Witch and /// ▲▲▲ \\\ .

Mostly due to Disaro, Houston has become a surprising hub of activity for live performance by Witch House artists, and like-minded industrial/dance musicians who lie just outside the genre (i.e. White Car, //TENSE//, etc.)

So this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna give em to you. Two tickets to see Of Montreal at Higherground on July 31st, to one lucky person, cause we love our fans and we know our fans love Of Montreal. We’ll be choosing the winner at random from our Facebook Fans, so if you’re a fan, thank you – all you need to do is comment on our facebook wall that you want the tickets to be eligible! – if you’re not a facebook fan you might want to be!

The Winner will be decided early next week!

OK, kids, it’s time to climb back into the Terrordome for another round of music biz news and cheeky analysis with yours truly. When you’ve observed this stuff for any stretch of time, you start to notice patterns, the most persistent being that the whole thing is fucked.

But let’s not be overly cynical. After all, music brings joy to the world. Joy, and sometimes even chlamydia.

• Want to sell music in this wacky new marketplace? Come up with an elaborate plan
  This post talks about how no one is making any money off recorded music (duh), but also suggests that the cure for this is to get out of the album/single mindset and go broadly (but strategically) conceptual. While I don’t disagree with the basic premise here, it’s a bit vague, and requires a skill set many musicians simply don’t have. I’m a musician myself, and I’ve increasingly looked for clever ways to leverage my brand (just threw up in my mouth) across my digital assets (oops, I did it again). And it’s worked really well! I’ve heard plenty of hucksters selling new strategies for musicians, and a lot of what they say boils down to “be interesting.” Unfortunately, a lot of artists that are really great at making music happen to be as dull as doornobs. On the other hand, Lady GaGa is “interesting,” but do I want to listen to her music? Negative.

• Cloud music gets better sounding
  And it’s made by Dolby! No, not Thomas Dolby. Although he did blind us with. . . science! This is a “High Efficiency AAC audio codec (part of the MPEG-4 standard) that “offers high quality audio at low bit rates,” and is “designed specifically to ensure no detectable deterioration in sound quality for music on bandwidth-constrained applications.” Maybe it’ll go some way to solving the “digital music sounds like ass” problem we talked about in the comments of my last post. Or not.

• Abbey Road Studios almost put up for sale; rescued by “historic landmark” protection
  EMI owns Abbey Road Studios. EMI is hemorrhaging cash. Hence the “for sale” sign. Well, there’s not gonna be any foreclosures on the horizon, ’cause the British Government has bestowed historic status upon the Fab Four‘s track-laying HQ. The Grade II classification doesn’t prohibit changes to the building but requires that “care must be taken to ensure that any alterations with respect to its character and interest are fully considered.” Which means it won’t be a Ben & Jerry’s like the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Still, I’d love to taste a cone called “Revolution Number Lime.”

• Google pulls music blogs; scribes to leave moms’ basements for first time in decade
  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the gift that keeps on giving. Because of this legislation, Google is required to take down sites using its Blogger architecture that are in violation of copyright law, lest the search giant be liable for infringement. I don’t disagree with the basic premise that if you’re doing illegal stuff, you should be stopped from doing more of it, but everybody and their hipster brother knows that blogs are a major marketing/promotions engine for today’s music. As a semi-retired music writer who is still deluged with MP3s from labels who hope I’ll post their stuff, I find it a bit disingenuous that these notices of suspected infringement are sent at the same time the labels are pestering people to post tracks without negotiating licenses like they require for every other non-broadcast use. I’m just sayin.’

• Mommy, what’s a fair use?
  Well, my dear, fair use is a part of copyright law that recognizes that there are certain, limited conditions within which a copyrighted work can be used without requiring permission from rightsholders for “purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research” without being considered unlawful. Does everyone’s favorite mashup master Girl Talk qualify for this exception? He seems to think so. The law, on the other hand, might not.

And that’s all you get. See you next time inside the Terrordome!

Casey Rae-Hunter is a musician, producer, writer and music/media/tech/policy wonk in Washington, DC. This post does not necessarily reflect the views of his employer. You can harass Casey at his site, The Contrarian.

GA just released a great list compiling their favorites of the decade for no other reason than just to share what they like – and well, you know how much we like a good list. And this is one of the best. I mean, any best of list that contains Bonnie Prince Billy, Farben, Tim Hecker and Broadcast on the same page is basically a contender for best list ever.

This month sees the reissuing of the Buzzcocks’ first three albums in comprehensive two-disc sets from Mute Records. Even though I’ve yet to hear the quality of their mastering, I’m going to call this good news on faith. All three albums are wonderful. The Buzzcocks legacy may be dwarfed by some of their peers like The Clash or The Sex Pistols, but their output is as good as anything in the 70′s British Punk canon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sprs4rml2gY

Another Music in a Different Kitchen, their debut, is also their third best. This is only in light of the excellence of the subsequent albums and is not to say Another Music isn’t worthy of your time. Tracks like “Fast Cars” and “Autonomy” are among the band’s greatest. This is a brisk and consistent collection of quality punk songs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkF50iY2nDs

Love Bites, my favorite Buzzcocks record, came out six months later. The band didn’t revolutionize their approach with this album, but they sure refined it. The music on Love Bites is fantastic and the lyrics are inspired, anti-love tirades. One of the catalysts for the punk rock movement was the need for an antidote to the glutenous, over-wrought popular music of the time. The way Love Bites subverts the cliched sentiments of conventional pop music is delightful and just a bit devilish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foSC0rujhwQ

The Buzzcocks third album (which would be followed by an extended hiatus and irregular appearances of forgettable albums) was A Different Kind of Tension, released a mere year and a half after their debut. A Different Kind of Tension, though a bit uneven, finds the Buzzcocks in an ambitious and exploratory mood. Tracks like “Paradise” and “I Don’t Know What To Do With My Life” wouldn’t be out of place on either of the previous albums, but others, like the deceptively sweet “You Say You Don’t Love Me” and the sprawling, album-highlight “I Believe,” push the boundaries of the band’s sound in exciting directions.

These two-disc sets retail at $16.97, which is a heck of a price. Anyone with the slightest interest in punk owes it to his or herself to look into these seminal albums.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_drsJq_p0yU

RIP.